Librivox Local Dev with Docker

Building

First, make sure you've cloned the librivox-ansible submodule:

cd librivox-ansible
git submodule init
git submodule update
cd ..

Now, back in the parent directory, you should be able to build the docker image:

docker build -t librivox-local .

(This step will take a while depending on your network speed and the speed of your local mirrors, but you only have to do it when there are breaking changes, which seems to be very infrequent.)

Running

There's some first-time setup that's required to get the librivox-catalog code out of the docker image and somewhere accessible:

./first-time-setup.sh

You should now have a ./librivox-catalog directory that has all of the librivox-catalog code in it, including the git repo, and this is where you should point your IDE. From now on, you can start the server up any time like this:

docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)"/librivox-catalog:/librivox/www/librivox.org/catalog librivox-local

That will drop you into a bash shell inside the container, which is mostly useful for debugging.

NOTE: This will give you a new container every time with a fresh copy of the database. If you're precious about any custom data or config you've set up, then remove the --rm flag and docker start/docker stop the container as usual.

Accessing the Site

Make sure your /etc/hosts file contains the following:

172.17.0.2        librivox.org
172.17.0.2    dev.librivox.org
172.17.0.2  forum.librivox.org
172.17.0.2   wiki.librivox.org
172.17.0.2    www.librivox.org

Then, you can open up the site here: https://librivox.org/search

When we build the image, we make a new HTTPS certificate to use, so your browser should show you a big warning that the site isn't safe. You can just accept the risk and continue.

Caveats

The site is running inside the container, so you don't actually have PHP or the database or anything set up on your main OS. This means that there are some operations that are best performed from inside the container:

• Running the tests
• Connecting to the database

Appendix: What's with the freaky first-time setup?

The Ansible playbooks provision everything into this directory: /librivox/www/librivox.org/catalog, including some additional config files that are not checked into the librivox-catalog repository. Without those config files, nothing will run.

To work around this, what we do is:

1. Back up the catalog files to /librivox/www/librivox.org/catalog.bak.
2. Start the container with ./librivox-catalog mounted over the top of /librivox/www/librivox.org/catalog. At this point, that directory will be empty.
3. Inside the container, we copy everything from catalog.bak to catalog, which brings the whole git repo and all of the config files we need. At this point, you'll have a heap of stuff in ./librivox-catalog on the host, but since the files were created by the container, it'll all belong to the root user.
4. On the host, we change the ownership of the directory to be the current user instead of root, which is generally what you want.